Market Summary

Bitcoin Price: US$ 37,728.95 (-2.05%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 2,781.71 (-2.62%)

Liquidation Scares, Sushi’s Restructure, & Reminiscences of a Crypto Cowboy

• Over the weekend, FTM was one of the tokens that underwent a significant drawdown, experiencing a -26.5% in price in the past 7 days.
• In part, this was due to large positions facing liquidation calls on Scream, a money market platform on Fantom. A whale with ~$45M of FTM collateral was being liquidated and is currently down to $14M in FTM collateral.
• This particular user over-levered their FTM positions and bought $SOLID and $DEUS with their loans. These tokens were then locked up for 4 years in their respective protocols. This prevented the whale from having any liquidity to manage their loans on Scream.
• As the user’s positions got liquidated by liquidation bots, gas prices on Fantom experienced a large spike—averaging at 3.8k Gwei, the highest it has ever reached. Fear spread amongst Fantom Chain users as these large liquidation events have the ability to congest the chain as bots compete for liquidations. This spurred users to move their tokens off-chain onto CEXes or bridge it off Fantom before such an event occurs.
• As whales get liquidated, it’ll likely cause a large drawdown in price that could cascade into larger liquidation events. Users of money market platforms are advised to manage their levered positions responsibly to avoid liquidations.
• Sushi received a restructuring proposal from JiroOno. The proposed restructuring has three components, each of which the community will need to approve through governance. The first component asks for 6m SUSHI, vesting over four years, for current and future contributor compensation. The second item proposes creating a compensation committee. The committee would be responsible for all aspects of compensation management. The committee will negotiate rates, track KPIs, establish responsibilities, and review performance. Thirdly, and probably most challenging, is a leadership search. With the dramatic loss of its previous leadership team and the crumbling of the Frog Nation proposal, Sushi has identified the need to find new leadership. The proposed search will be an extensive undertaking as the proposal allows any community member to nominate themselves.
• In this 2 hour in-person exclusive, Tommy Shaughnessy hosts investor, crypto OG, and cowboy Punk, Tyler Reynolds. We talk through the highlights of Tyler’s crypto journey from going all-in in 2013, to riding the highs of DeFi summer, and angel investing today. He shares insightful gems on bet sizing, token value capture, and much more.

Record-high surge in Ethereum Name Service domains triggers 90% rally in ENS

• The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is one project that is looking to help facilitate Web3 adoption by making it easier for DApp users to interact with the Ethereum network. This is accomplished through the creation of human-readable Ethereum addresses that can be converted into the normal machine-readable alphanumeric codes.
• Three reasons for the recent price turnaround for ENS include the sudden increase in demand for 3- and 4-digit ENS domains, a new record high number of domain registrations in April and a rise in protocol revenue that has helped increase the funds available to the ENS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
• The record month of growth for ENS also helped push the total registration past the 1 million mark for the first time in history.
• As a result of the renewed interest in ENS domains, the protocol saw its second highest monthly revenue at $7,838,962 generated from registrations and renewals.

Nym Technologies raises $300M to advance internet privacy, sending token price up

• Swiss privacy startup Nym Technologies announced it has secured $300 million in commitments from venture capital partners in support of the NYM Innovation Fund. Nym intends to issue grants to developers and incentivize them to build on top of Nym’s decentralized infrastructure. This funding comes a couple of weeks after its native token NYM launched on major crypto exchanges, including OKX and Huobi. 
• At the time of publication, the NYM token traded at an average price of $0.92, and its 24-hour trading volume has witnessed a spike since the fund’s announcement. The day that NYM was first listed on April 14, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden addressed attendees at the token launch event in Paris, where he attributed contemporary internet privacy problems to the decisions of antiquated 1970s computer networks.
• Nym hosts mixnets, or systems of network protocols that obscure individuals’ metadata footprints and protects applications, as well as their coins and wallets, against mass surveillance. Applications built on Nym work to improve upon third-party privacy services offered on virtual private networks (VPNs) and Tor.

ApeCoin integrates with Polygon amid NFT mint backlash and speculation

• ApeCoin (APE) announced its integration with Ethereum (ETH) sidechain Polygon (MATIC) after the recent Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds nonfungible token (NFT) minting incident led to speculation about a new chain for APE.
• On Sunday, Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, opened the minting for Otherdeeds NFT land. The drop gained overwhelming support from its community, with an estimated $300 million in sales. Despite this, the drop encountered a list of issues such as pushing ETH gas fees to unprecedented highs, which meant that users paid around 2 to 5 ETH for gas.
• Because of this, users who failed to mint NFTs but still paid ETH gas fees were outraged and expressed their frustration through Twitter — some even tweeted that they are pulling out of their APE-related investments.
• While Yuga Labs promised to refund their gas, some users speculated that the failure was a planned marketing stunt, i.e., highlighting a problem, then announcing a new chain for APE. However, an ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) representative denies this.

Solana developers share 3 key mitigation steps to make the network robust

• The Solana network faced its seventh outage on Saturday, resulting in a downtime of over seven hours. The developer team has released an outage report, along with three key mitigation steps to make the network more stable.
• The network outage on Solana was caused by a significant surge in the number of transactions due to nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots. The bots used Candy Machine, a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections.
• The transaction volume reached six million per second, overflowing individual nodes with 100 Gbps data. As a result, validators ran out of data memory, leading to a loss of consensus among them.
• The developers ruled out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and blamed NFT minting bots for the congestion. The network came online at 3:30 am UTC on Sunday.

Argentina’s largest two banks to allow crypto trading

• Argentina’s largest and second-largest private banks, Banco Galicia and Brubank, have announced that they will allow customers to make crypto purchases.
• Bloomberg reported on Monday that a resounding 60% of respondents to an Argentinian poll asked for more access to crypto, which catalyzed the banks’ decisions to begin allowing crypto trading.
• Affiliate at market research firm Americas Market Intelligence, Ignacio Carballo, tweeted confirmation on Tuesday with screenshots of Banco Galicia’s online interface that it had begun supporting Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), USD Coin (USDC) and Ripple (XRP) purchases.

Algorand becomes first US blockchain sponsor of FIFA World Cup

• Blockchain network Algorand has partnered with FIFA inking a sponsorship and technical partner deal as the network becomes the soccer association’s first official blockchain platform.
• The deal announced on Monday will also see Algorand become a regional supporter in North America and Europe for the 2022 FIFA World Cup to be held in Qatar in November and December.
• Algorand will also be an official sponsor of the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in 2023.
• The proof-of-stake chain will assist FIFA in developing its “digital assets’ strategy,” with the announcement explaining blockchain technology in the context of nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Therefore, it may be likely that Algorand could assist FIFA with developing its own NFT collection. Additionally, as part of the partnership, Algorand will be providing an “official blockchain-supported wallet solution.”